INCLUDE_DATA
An ongoing social project

Presentation: Stanford prison experiment

Posted: March 31st, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: SCIENTIFIC & QUASI-SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »



The Stanford prison experiment was a small-scale simulation of a prison environment, where 24 college males were selected to play either the role of a prison guard or an inmate. Philip Zimbardo organized the experiment with the hope of proving that sadistic tendencies in prison could be traced back to personality traits. After a relatively tame first day, a riot broke out on the second day, after which the actors of either role began to deeply absorb their new identities. Prisoners, when given the opportunity to leave, would remain in the mock jail. Guards became increasingly sadistic and worked together to humiliate the prisoners. For example, the guards simulated homosexual sex with some of the prisoners, forced some to sleep on the concrete floor, forced others to give up their mattresses to free an inmate in solitary confinement, and removed the waste buckets from some of the cells, causing conditions to rapidly deteriorate. After a visiting graduate student called attention to the poor conditions of the experiment, it was shut down after only 6 days instead of the original intended 14.

The experiment has been criticized on a number of grounds, particularly the deterministic nature of the roles. Individuals tended to conform to roles based on hat was expected of them; for example, one of the guards imitated the warden from Cool Hand Luke. Also, language used to describe the experiment may have primed the behavior of the participants, as the setting of the prison likely did as well. Criticisms published in several leading psychology journals challenged the experiment’s conclusions that people slip mindlessly into roles and points out the importance of a leader, in this case, Zimbardo, in the development of tyranny, thus suggesting that Zimbardo’s briefing of the guards also primed them for sadistic action.


4 Comments on “Presentation: Stanford prison experiment”

  1. 1 Rufus Boullion said at 14:48 on April 12th, 2012:

    Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO. So what is good On-Page SEO?First your keyword must appear in the title.Then it must appear in the URL.You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….wait there’s even more Now what if i told you there was a simple WordPress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you? That’s right AUTOMATICALLY, just watch this 4minute video for more information at. WordPress Seo Plugin

  2. 2 Instant Traffic Robot 2 said at 13:54 on April 20th, 2012:

    If you’re serious about making money with your website, watch this free video about getting free instant targeted traffic to your site http://instanttrafficrobot2.com

  3. 3 alex goad said at 07:55 on April 25th, 2012:

    Hi,Watch This FREE Video How To Build Over 100,000 backlinks and drove over 500,000 targeted visitors from free traffic source to your sites http://rankbuilder2.net/ Get Google Top Spot Now

  4. 4 sesli sohbet said at 17:39 on May 19th, 2012:

    I was studying some of your content on this site and I believe this web site is very informative ! Continue putting up.


Leave a Reply

  • Powered by WP Hashcash